Don’t send students home for lack of fees, Magoha urges School principals

Education CS George Magoha has urged school principals not to send away students for lack of fees and instead agree with parents on how to settle fee balances once schools reopen next week. 

Magoha said the government will disburse tuition fees to all secondary schools next week and urged principals to retain all students in school irrespective of whether or not they will have cleared their fees.

He spoke at Barani Secondary School in Malindi town where he presided over the ground-breaking ceremony of three Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) classrooms, accompanied by Basic Education PS Dr. Julius Juan.

The CS’ sentiments come as a relief to parents, who are worried over the frequency of paying school fees following the crash programme in the education sector to compensate for time lost when schools closed for about nine months due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the same time, Mr. Magoha asked school administrators to be vigilant and flush out any unruly students before they burn school property, adding that arson in schools was the work of sadists. “If you identify a small group of students who want to go home, let them go. This nonsense of trying to burn schools because you have not been reading, you have been on drugs and now you want to burn the school so that everybody else suffers is sadistic,” he insisted.

Prof. Magoha said the government would not be deterred by the action of a few unruly students, noting that out of the more than 10,000 secondary schools in the country, only between 50 and 100 had been affected by arson.

“I do not condone indiscipline in my life and I am not about to condone it now. Any child who is bold enough to put fire either in his father’s house or in his own house, or in a public house, that one is a criminal,” he said.

On the construction of the CBC classrooms, Prof. Magoha assured contractors that they would be paid on time to be able to complete phase one earlier than the April 2022 deadline given by the President and start phase two by May 2022.